Chad, Matt, Michelle, and Catherine are sitting around one night in a remote cabin, talking about how, as Matt puts it, “what we need to do is come up with scenes.”  The four are aspiring Hollywood actors perennially stuck in the “aspiring” mode, and Matt has hit on the idea—after screening yet another pretentious, amateurish “indie” film at an L.A. festival—of writing and making their own flick. After all, if even a rat can cook…

So off they go to the woods to cook up a cinematic dish the four of them can make together. The first night out, Michelle runs out of steam early. “We’ve got to do something,” she says, “cuz I’m going to fall asleep.”  Uh-huh.

She heads off to bed and dreams—or does she?—that a stalker with a paper bag over his head is lurking around in the dark.  Matt decides the dream is a great basis for a low-budget do-it-yourself “mumblecore” style flick, and off they go.  More or less.

For the audience, the trick will be in determining whether this is a comedy that’s not very funny, a relationship drama that you can’t take very seriously, or a horror film—which very often looks like a combination of the first two.  You’d be best off to be prepared for the latter, because Baghead is most effective as Horror Lite.

What the film has going for it is its deadpan goofiness—and interesting, if perhaps too-realistic, performances from Ross Partridge as Matt and Elise Muller as Catherine.  Both pretty well embody the perfect blend of borderline charisma and slackerama that makes for a perennial indie D-lister.  And both Partridge and Muller have a pretty good list of C-list credits to their names, so they’ve obviously got a decent handle on what that life is all about—and talent enough to play slight parodies of themselves and their peers.

Steve Zissis and Greta Gertwig as Chad and Michelle don’t fare so well, coming off as mere stereotypes and foils for Matt, in particular.  The film quickly turns into a one-man show, and there’s no doubt whose show it is.  And that doesn’t work too well for a horror film, in which you expect someone to die every ten minutes.

The extended setup for the film—the part that makes you question whether this is a lame comedy or an unintentionally comic romance—doesn’t help, either.  By the time the horror setup is really in play, the film is well past half-over.  And people aren’t dying near quick enough.

Writers and directors the Duplass brothers—who, in their own words, make mainstream films that look simply like mumblecore—are pretty much dependent on the viewer’s awareness of the indie-filmmaking world (and the plight of aspiring actors) to hold the film together.  And if, as they’ve asserted, the film is actually tightly-plotted, the mumblecore disguise fits too tightly.  The film comes off as though the Brothers Duplass—like their fictional foursome—jumped right from High Concept to scenes, without bothering to come up with a compelling story that actually drives the crafting of those scenes. 

Remember, I’ve managed a mere 160-word plot synopsis for this review—and to give you anymore than that would literally constitute spoilers.  So the plot is thin indeed; and unless you have an abiding interest in either mumblecore, out-of-work actors, off-the-beaten-path horror flicks, or Mark and Jay Duplass, Baghead will likely seem to you as little more than loosely-structured scenes from a hat… or from a paper bag with holes in it. 

By the time Chad says, “I didn’t have it in me to torture him any more,” you’ll likely wish you could also be so lucky.

Baghead is rated R for “language, some sexual content and nudity.”  And the best part is, it’s all of the completely gratuitous kind.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of Baghead.